Stakeholders from all four Tulare Lake Basin counties reconvened on October 26th to discuss next steps and priorities for the implementation of the Tulare Lake Basin (TLB) Disadvantaged Community (DAC) water study. The TLB study stakeholders group, which emerged from the study's former Stakeholder Oversight Advisory Committee (SOAC), is collaborating to accelerate sustainable community water solutions in the region. At the October meeting, stakeholders discussed local case studies showing progress toward community water solutions, as well as opportunities to target funding to implement the study recommendations in the Tulare Lake Basin.

The meeting included residents from Kings, Kern, Fresno, and Tulare Counties, as well as representatives from the USDA, the State Water Resources Control Board, the Department of Water Resources, and several elected officials. This stakeholder group is following up on the recommendations from the TLB DAC water study, which was released in August 2014. The initial study was funded by the California Department of Water Resources, which awarded $2 million to the County of Tulare in 2011 to develop a plan for regional water and wastewater solutions for disadvantaged communities in the Tulare Lake Basin, including areas in Fresno, Kern, Kings and Tulare Counties. The final report included 59 specific recommendations addressing planning, infrastructure, and other management actions for achieving sustainable community water solutions.

At the October meeting, Laurel Firestone updated stakeholders on new developments since the completion of the TLB DAC water study, including the transition of the state Division of Drinking Water to the State Water Board, the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and Proposition 1, and the new resources available for water system consolidations.

The revived stakeholder committee serves as an informal, ad-hoc group to discuss priorities, next steps, and opportunities for the implementation of the study’s recommendations. By bringing together key stakeholders, the group will promote collaboration, information sharing, and implementation of best practices throughout the Tulare Lake Basin. The next meeting will be held in January. Contact CWC if you are interested in joining the stakeholder committee.

Background on the Tulare Lake Basin DAC Water StudyCWC led the coordination and facilitation of a diverse stakeholder group of local community and state agencies to guide the four Tulare Lake Basin Counties (Kern, Tulare, Kings and Fresno) in development of a regional plan for disadvantaged community (DACs) drinking water and wastewater needs. The project goals were to provide solutions that DACs can implement to provide safe, clean, and affordable potable water supplies, and effective and affordable wastewater treatment and disposal. The solutions also address long-term sustainability for operation, management, and financing these services. For more information on the Study, click Here.

Funded by a $2 million grant from the California Department of Water Resources to Tulare County, this plan will ultimately be integrated into the various regional water management plans in the region. It will also be used to inform the County General Plan and funding application efforts.

The project has created a comprehensive database of more than 500 unincorporated communities reaching over 700 stakeholders in the four-county region, and identified their water and wastewater needs. Nearly 200 of these communities lack any type of centralized or regulated drinking water system. The project used the priorities identified by the stakeholder group to develop pilot studies that guided the development of a comprehensive plan for the region. The final plan is now complete and will be available publicly in September 2014, along with the database of unincorporated communities. The three-year study provides concrete recommendations to ensure safe drinking water and effective wastewater treatment for disadvantaged communities. CWC will work to foster implementation of the Study recommendations at all levels, local, regional and state.

Two Tulare County environmental groups were among eight across the Central Valley on Tuesday awarded a total $275,000 from the Fresno Regional Foundation.

Twenty-five proposals were submitted by groups to receive funds from the foundation to assist with the growth and support of San Joaquin River restoration activities in the Central Valley, but only eight organizations were selected.

The Community Water Center, based in Visalia, was granted $25,000 for its project to engage both residents and government officials in water solutions in the Tulare Lake Basin region. The project is designed so stakeholders develop disadvantaged community water solutions.

Tulare Basin Wildlife Partners, in Three Rivers, was awarded $15,000. The group proposed to conduct outreach, education and advocacy to build awareness and consent for sustainable natural resource planning strategies and smart growth principles in Tulare, Fresno and Kings counties.

Other groups awarded funds were Food Commons Fresno Trust, Fresno Metro Ministry, Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, Madera Coalition for Community Justice and Office of Community and Economic Development.

(02/17/2014) A chemical spill that left 300,000 residents of Charleston, West Virginia, without tap water last month is raising new concerns about the ability of the United States to maintain its high quality of drinking water.

While the U.S. has one of the safest water supplies in the world, experts say the Charleston contamination with a coal-washing chemical shows how quickly the trust that most Americans place in their drinking water can be shattered.

“We often don’t think about where our water comes from,” said Steve Fleischli, director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Water Program in Los Angeles. “Does it come from a nearby river or a lake, intermittent streams, isolated wetlands, or an aquifer? Yes, you may have a water treatment plant, but if your water source is not protected, people face a real risk.”

In Charleston on January 9, about 10,000 gallons of a little-known and unregulated chemical called 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) leaked from an aboveground storage tank into the Elk River. The amount of the chemical overwhelmed the carbon filtration system in the West Virginia American Water treatment plant about a mile downstream. Within a week, more than 400 people were treated at hospitals for rashes, nausea, vomiting, and other symptoms.

West Virginia American Water decided by January 13 that the water was again safe to drink, because the concentration of MCHM had fallen below one part per million. But it soon emerged that there was little scientific information backing up that safety threshold, and this past week many West Virginians were still not drinking tap water. “I wouldn’t drink it if you paid me,” West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller told National Public Radio last Monday.

Leaky Ponds of Coal Ash

While Congress was holding hearings on the West Virginia incident, the next one happened. On February 2, up to 82,000 tons of toxic coal ash spilled into the Dan River, near the border of North Carolina and Virginia, from a pond at a closed Duke Energy power plant. This week state health officials warned people not to swim in the river or eat fish from it.

The Associated Press reported February 13 that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Raleigh has launched a criminal investigation into the spill, seeking records from Duke Energy and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources—which had sued Duke last August for unpermitted discharges at Dan River and five other power plants.

“When you burn coal you leave behind metals and radioactivity,” said Robert B. Jackson, an environmental scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “The ash is quite toxic. The waste products we create to produce energy, the waste we generate every day, are a threat to drinking water quality.”

Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury, lead, thallium, and other dangerous contaminants. At power plants it is mixed with water, forming a slurry that is stored in large ponds. According to the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, 40 percent of the country’s coal ash ponds are located in the southeast and contain 118 billion gallons of toxic material. Most of these impoundments, like the one on the Dan River, are located near major waterways.

In 2008, the dike at an impoundment in eastern Tennessee failed at the Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston Fossil Plant. More than 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash spilled from the site and spread across more than 300 acres of land and water. Tests of nearby river water showed levels of lead and thallium exceeded safety limits for drinking water, but the TVA said at the time that the toxic metals were filtered out by water treatment processes. The TVA spent a year and a half cleaning up the sludge.

In 2000, the bottom of a coal ash pond in Kentucky crumbled and released an estimated 306 million gallons of slurry. Water supplies for 27,000 people were contaminated.

Following the Tennessee spill, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identified 676 coal ash impoundments at 240 facilities, assigning a “high hazard” rating to 45 ponds. The rating indicates that a failure would probably cause loss of human life.

Droughts, Floods, and Hogs

Another threat, Jackson said, is severe weather. Research suggests that dry regions will become drier and wet regions wetter as a result of climate change. Both extremes pose significant challenges for maintaining safe drinking water.

Jackson pointed to a 1999 hurricane that flooded hog farms in North Carolina. “Hurricane Floyd came through and flushed the contents of the hog waste lagoons out into the streams and rivers,” he said. The result was widespread fecal contamination of drinking water. More than decade after Floyd, North Carolina still has more than 4,000 hog waste lagoons.

At the other extreme of the weather spectrum is drought. Laurel Firestone, founder of the Community Water Center, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Visalia, California, said the most severe drought in California history may have a dramatic effect on water quality.

In a 2012 report prepared for the California State Water Control Board, scientists from the University of California at Davis found that about 254,000 people in the Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley are currently at risk for nitrate contamination of their drinking water. In one of the nation’s most productive farming regions, nitrates from heavily fertilized fields leach into the groundwater. “Many small communities cannot afford safe drinking water treatment,” the report said.

As a result of the current drought, farmers are having to rely on groundwater to irrigate their fields—which inevitably raises the concentration of nitrates in the water left in the ground. “The California drought is exacerbating problems that already existed,” Firestone said. “Those being affected first are people who depend on the shallow wells. They are canaries in the coal mine.” Exposures to high levels of nitrates can cause death, miscarriages, and blue baby syndrome, she said.

In general, Jackson said, and not just in California, “the most vulnerable group of people are those who get their water from a private water source. People who have private drinking water wells are far less protected than anyone else in the country. No one tests your water unless you pay for a test.”

Polluters ‘R Us

What worries Jackson and some other experts more than headline-making spills and weather is chronic pollution of a more insidious kind—from pharmaceuticals and personal care products, or PPCPs. Studies have shown that pharmaceuticals, especially antibiotics and steroids, are widely present in the nation’s water supply. We excrete them in our urine; our livestock do as well. Other chemicals from soaps, shampoos, and lotions get washed down the drains of our tubs and showers. Sewage treatment plants are not equipped to remove them. Some have been shown to disrupt the hormone system in fish.

The EPA states there are no known human health effects from low-level exposure to PPCPs in drinking water, “but special scenarios (one example being fetal exposure to low levels of medications that a mother would ordinarily be avoiding) require more investigation.”

“What we don’t know are the interactions of thousands of different compounds that are taking place in our lakes, streams, and aquifers,” said Jackson, who is studying the effects of some of the compounds on fish and mice. “When you have a spill like in West Virginia it’s terrible, but at least you know about it. The cases that may be more dangerous are the slow and steady spills and chemical reactions that we don’t know about.”

For municipal utilities, such new worries come at a very bad time. In the American Society of Civil Engineers 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, the nation’s drinking water infrastructure was given a D grade for aging pipes, some of which date back to the Civil War. “At the dawn of the 21st century, much of our drinking water infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life,” the report stated. The American Water Works Association estimates there are 240,000 water-main breaks per year in the U.S. The investment needed to bring the nation’s waterworks up to speed has been estimated in the trillions of dollars.

Money that might be devoted to such investments is instead being spent by a worried public on buying the stuff in plastic bottles. It made sense in West Virginia in recent weeks, but in general, according to Jackson, in spite of all the good reasons to be concerned about drinking water safety, resorting to bottles is not a sensible reflex. “People think bottled water is safer, but there is zero evidence that is true,” he said. “The quality of water in city tap water is regulated far more closely than bottled water.”

(01/2014) FRESNO COUNTY, CA — In the early morning between Los Angeles and Sacramento on Interstate 5 – before unbroken streams of semis crowd the highway, and tractors begin clawing the dry earth, the world is calm.

The dawn interlude, a quiet medley of things seemingly natural, is deceiving. The telling clue is a winding canal that meanders, without a riffle, past sprawling farms and small towns, feedlots and processing plants that mark the plain of California’s Central Valley. The canal’s concrete banks are bounded by chain-link fences and occasionally punctuated by large pumping stations that push the manmade river uphill, not down.

For almost a century, water providers and food producers in California have engaged in one of history’s most ambitious industrial enterprises focused on one objective – moving water where it won’t go on its own. California’s 80-year-old system of canals – the State Water Project and the federally-financed Central Valley Water Project — stitch together an audacious hydrological network comprising 1,200 miles of aqueducts, canals and pipelines. Collectively, both systems are capable of annually delivering from distant Sierra Nevada snowfields and streams about 11 million acre feet – 3.6 trillion gallons – of water for agricultural, municipal and industrial use.

The consequences of tapping, piping and pumping water from one end of the state, where it originates, to the other end, where it is used principally to irrigate the planet’s most valuable harvest, have been studied for decades. But as climate change alters California’s moisture trends, and older challenges like groundwater pollution go unaddressed, the need to better understand the state’s intersecting trends in water use have never been more urgent.

On Friday, prompted by a severe and lingering drought that made 2013 the driest calendar year ever, and nearly three weeks of equally severe drought this month, California Governor Jerry Brown formally declared a public drought emergency. He called the dire dry conditions “perhaps the worst drought that California has ever seen.”

State water supply authorities anticipate that actual water deliveries will be far less than the maximum, as they have been in other droughts. For example, in 2008, another exceedingly dry year, both systems only managed to deliver about 4.5 million acre feet to water users, or 41 percent of the system’s capacity.

The 2014 drought portends big trouble for California. Water delivered by the two transport networks irrigates roughly 3.75 million acres and just over 40 percent of the state’s nearly 82,000 farms. In addition, the supply network satisfies the thirst of other industries, notably the oil industry of the southwest San Joaquin Valley, as well as 24 million of California’s 38 million residents, most of whom live in southern California.

The list of challenges is growing:• According to the state Department of Water Resources, California has experienced nine bouts of large-scale, multi-year drought since the beginning of the 20th century. But even for California, the depth of the current drought is exceptional. In 2013, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and several other major cities across the state shattered previous records for lowest precipitation since record keeping began 164 years ago.• The snowpack of the High Sierra that supplies the system is declining because of the warming, and drying climate. This year has proven to be especially dry. As of January 1, the state’s snowpack stood at a meager 20 percent of average. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, nearly the entire state is in a state of “severe” or “extreme” drought.• Under current warming and drying trends, the state Department of Water Resources has predicted that the snowpack will be reduced by a quarter by the end of the century. That, in turn, could lead to a 17 percent increase in groundwater pumping from the Central Valley. If that scenario occurs, 2.12 million more acre-feet of water, or 690.8 billion gallons, will be pumped to the surface, prompting an increase in energy use (and water consumption) to run the pumps. (An acre-foot, the amount of water it takes to flood an acre of land in a foot of water, is approximately 326,000 gallons or 1,234 cubic meters.)• The Water Resources Department predicts disruptions as often in one in every three years as water levels in the northern California reservoirs fall to “dead pool,” in which water is too low to be released into the canal network.• West and south, out of the mountains and onto the plains, wasteful farm practices and lower water supplies are draining the life from fisheries in California’s San Joaquin Delta, east of San Francisco.• Further south, the state’s Central Valley has become a great dumping ground for industrial and agricultural toxins – pesticides, fertilizers and other forms of industrial waste contaminate municipal and private wells with nitrates. Today, tens of thousands of people across the valley — most of them living in poor and politically disconnected towns — rely on groundwater that contains contaminants that exceed state limits and is dangerous to use for drinking and bathing. The agriculture sector, though, is reluctant to limit its use of pesticides and fertilizers, viewing them as a mainstay in California’s $44 billion farm economy.• The threats to drinking water extend beyond the state’s agricultural regions. A February report from the State Water Resources Control Board identified 31 principal contaminants, including arsenic, uranium, perchlorate and pesticide residues in groundwater serving 21 million Californians.• A new project meant to ensure a more stable supply of water to farmers and to wildlife, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, is in the proposal stage. But its cost, complexity, and environmental risks in an era of economic austerity pose serious political challenge to its construction.• California’s state Water Plan, which is updated every five years, calls for water conservation to anticipate and respond to shortages, though the cumulative effect is not reducing demand sufficiently to secure the state’s water supply.

California, in sum, is being buffeted by cross-cutting trends in water supply and demand that are growing more complex, more expensive, and much harder to resolve.

“We’ve built a massive set of water infrastructure in the state and that has brought benefits to many, many different water users,” says Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, a premier water research group. (Circle of Blue is a Pacific Institute affiliate.) “But relying on infrastructure and engineering solutions is not going to solve California’s 21st century water problems. There are few places to build big, new projects. We have a better understanding now of their true, economic, environmental and social costs. And frankly, there’s just no more unspoken for water in the state.”

The First Drops Start In North?

If there is a starting point for California’s water supply challenge it begins in the erratic snowfall of the Sierra Nevada, which form a high wall 150 miles east of the Pacific. A decade ago, the canal network routinely transported 12.3 million acre-feet from north to south annually. But that volume has dwindled by 12 percent, according to state figures.

From the Sierras, the diminishing supplies of water reach the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, east of San Francisco, the great tidal estuary formed at the place the state’s two longest rivers, the Sacramento and San Joaquin, end – and where the state’s two largest manmade rivers, the California Aqueduct and Delta Mendota Canal, begin.

Once a vast expanse of tidal marshlands covering 1,600 square miles, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has been reduced to a highly engineered and straitjacketed system. As the intensity of agriculture and industry in the Central Valley ratcheted up, the sinuous meanders of natural rivers were straightened to ease the passage of large cargo ships, which today haul fruits, vegetables and other raw materials out of the Central Valley to San Francisco Bay and points around the globe.

Levees were built to encourage the conversion of the wetlands to cropland. They also prevented spring flooding. A century of re-engineering and heavy farming has taken its toll. Without the spring flooding from the Sacramento and San Joaquin to replenish organic material in the southern Delta’s characteristic peat soils, the ground dries, disintegrates and collapses; in some places in the Delta the ground has sunk to 15 feet below sea level.

As the Delta subsides, the levees holding back the ocean also sink. And with rising sea level, the threat of saltwater intrusion from San Francisco Bay increases. The worry is that the sea could overtop the levees, saturating the Delta farmland in salt, and overwhelming the pumps that pull water from the Delta and transfer it into the great concrete arteries that deliver water to points south. And because the Delta is the source of the bulk of the state’s exported water to southern California, what happens here has repercussions far outside the region.

To reduce the risks posed to this tremendously complex and vulnerable system, the state has proposed a massive new engineering scheme called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP. Backed enthusiastically by Gov. Brown, the centerpieces of the $23 billion plan are massive tunnels capable of shunting as much as 9,000 cubic feet (67,000 gallons) of fresh water per second toward the aqueducts from further up the Sacramento River rather from the pumps in the Delta.

This, state officials say, would not only improve water quality for downstream users but help to achieve the “co-equal” goal of restoring the Delta’s ailing aquatic ecosystems. “I think any biologist familiar with the Delta would tell you that more freshwater through the Delta won’t be enough in and of itself to ‘restore’ the ecosystem, though it could have ecological benefits,” wrote Nancy Vogel, a spokesperson for the Department of Water Resources. ”[But] changing how water is diverted from the Delta also may have environmental benefits.”

Many residents in the northern part of the state, however, see the project as an appeasement of wealthy and politically powerful interests in the southern part of the state. They also call it a plan for ruination of the Delta, and for damaging the communities and farms scattered across the low-lying pastoral landscape.

Meanwhile, the semi-arid reaches of the Central Valley south of the Delta, dry landscapes remade with northern water, are also suffering.

Pumps That Drive Water Uphill

One of the big engines of California’s elaborate water delivery system is the Banks Pumping Plant. Found on a winding back road under the wind turbine-stippled hills of Altamont Pass, 249 feet above sea level, the rectangular building is tucked into a ravine under the triangular summit of Mt. Diablo.

Jim Odom oversees the plant. A stout man with a jovial laugh and sleek sunglasses perched on his baseball hat, Odom began as a maintenance worker at the pumping plant in the 1980s and worked his way up to his current job as the plant’s supervisor.

The Banks plant, he explains, lifts water 250 vertical feet, by way of the plant’s powerful pumps, from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into the California Aqueduct. Within this 450-mile long concrete artery, water is delivered to farms, industries and cities to the south. When the aqueduct hits the Tehachapi Mountains at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, the water is again lifted, this time nearly 2,000 feet by the Edmonston Pumping Plant, up and over the hills and into the Los Angeles basin.

“The State Water Project has enhanced California,” Odom says. “There’s some debate about how it needs to be managed. But the state wouldn’t be the same with out it.”

Powerful as it is, the Banks Pumping Plant is just one of the hydrological engines that transports water south. Another is the Tracy Pumping Plant, operated next door by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the starting point of the Delta-Mendota Canal, which runs parallel to the California Aqueduct. The two plants and the water they pump supply millions of acres of irrigated farmland and 24 million Californians with drinking water.

But that water supply engine is faltering. In the time since Banks came online in the early 1960s, the state’s population has grown dramatically, from 15 million to 38 million. The amount of irrigated cropland statewide has nearly doubled, from 4.7 million acres in 1929, three years before construction began on the Central Valley Project, to over 11 million acres in 2007.

Because of climate variations, reductions in water supply and pumping have changed the nature of Odom’s job significantly, he says, forcing the plant to respond rapidly to changing water availability. The ups and downs in water deliveries mean that the pumps must be started up and shut down frequently. “It’s a little harder on equipment because it’s not made to stop and start all the time,” he says. “But if they say start up three or four units, we do it. If they say, stop one, or two, we do it, too. We do what the folks in Sacramento tell us.”

Of Subsidence and Salt

Tracing the aqueduct and its water supply south, from the Banks plant into the great dry sweeps of the Central Valley, is to enter an industrial agricultural landscape utterly transformed.

Westlands Water District, west of Fresno, is the poster child of California’s remaking through brute-force water engineering. Home to some of the state’s wealthiest and most politically connected farmers, Westlands has used its pull to compensate for its dearth of natural rainfall.

Today the district commands more imported water than any single agricultural district in the U.S., with farmers holding contracts for about 1.2 million acre-feet of water from the Central Valley Project – a volume large enough to inundate Delaware in a foot of water.

But Westlands is showing signs of strain under several years of severe statewide drought. Over the last three years, the district’s allocations have been cut by 40, 60, and 90 percent respectively.

Dan Errotabere’s family has farmed here, in the arid western reaches of Westlands, since leaving the Basque region of Spain in the 1920s. Before the Central Valley Project came online in the 1930s, most of the farms in this dry area were small, no more than 160 acres, and completely reliant on groundwater, he says. But the Central Valley Project changed all that.

The rectilinear rows of Errotabere’s farm – 6000 acres of garlic, chickpeas, onions, cotton, lettuce and almonds – are well beyond the dimensions most Americans associate with a family farm. The scale of the enterprise is one of necessity, he says. “This is not a cheap investment out here. You can’t be a forty acre guy or a mom and pop cattle outfit,” he says. “The farms out here work on economies of scale.”

The bone-dry farm has been plowed into arrow-straight rows by huge tillers. The only hints of green that are visible are shoots of “volunteer” chickpeas along the road’s edge. He explains that he obsessively keeps the soil free of weeds in order to conserve small but important volumes of water.

Errotabere bends down and scrapes a little dirt from one of the rows, revealing a bulb of garlic underneath. Between the seed rows, thin strips of black drip tape run through shallow furrows. The tape is part of the elaborate water-saving technology being employed across the farm, which he says has cut the water demands for this particular parcel in half.

In spite of efforts toward greater efficiency, water is still in dangerously short supply. Water reductions, he says, force him to heavily tap groundwater and take roughly one-fifth of his land out of production.

Gayle Holman, a spokesperson for Westlands Water District, says this proportion is below average for the district. So far this year, about one third of the district’s 600,000 acres have been fallowed (though a sizable proportion of this land has been fallowed due to soil salinization).

Moreover, Errotabere says 60 percent to 70 percent of his water this year has come from aquifers, with the rest supplied via the Central Valley Project. “Our water table is dropping and we have to keep lowering our wells,” he says. “I haven’t seen subsidence yet but that may be coming.”

Statistics on groundwater overdraft are difficult to come by, since California is one of the few states in the U.S. that does not monitor groundwater usage. However, a recent study from the University of California at Irvine found that from 2003 and 2010 the Central Valley aquifer – the second most pumped aquifer in the U.S. after the Ogallala – lost a volume equivalent to the capacity of Lake Mead, on the Colorado River near Las Vegas. Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States.

Throughout the valley, subsidence due to unchecked groundwater pumping is a major issue – in some places the land has subsided by more than 20 feet. “Continued groundwater depletion at this rate may well be unsustainable,” states the report, “with potentially dire consequences for the economic and food security of the United States.”

Another serious problem of tapping groundwater in this part of the San Joaquin Valley is salinity. Unlike groundwater pumped in other parts of the valley, water drawn from its western edge tends to be highly saline, on average between four and 13 times saltier than water taken from the aqueduct, according to a district report.

Errotabere points to the effect of reduced water deliveries to the local economy. “Farming is the economic fabric,” Errotabere says, explaining that he sells his tomatoes, garlic, chickpeas and onions to processing plants along the Interstate 5 corridor. “If I don’t get my water, they don’t run.”

And yet, at least in the short run, the lack of water and reduced acreage has not been met with a commensurate loss of revenue for Westlands farmers. According to a 2011 Pacific Institute study that examines the economic effects of the 2007 and 2009 drought, crop yields remained steady even though fallowed acreage more than doubled, from just over 46,000 acres in 2000 to 122,000 acres in 2009.

In the same period, overall revenues increased, from $1.27 billion to $1.49 billion, suggesting that when faced with water shortages California’s farmers can be innovative in developing water-conserving production practices.

But it may still not be enough.

Do Westlands farmers need to downsize in order to adapt to what seems to be the “new normal” of reduced deliveries? Errotabere rejects that notion. “That might work for organic farms in Sonoma. But that’s not the model here,” he says.

Low-Income Residents Supplied With Toxic Drinking Water

In Kettleman City, half an hour south of Dan Errotabere’s farm, Maricella Mares-Allatore, an environmental activist with the Bay Area environmental group Greenaction, considers another outcome of groundwater use and management in the Central Valley.

She sits in the local Starbucks and sips black coffee brewed with the town’s water, which comes from its aquifer. The irony is somewhat diabolical.

Kettleman’s groundwater is contaminated with arsenic at an average of 12.5 parts per billion (and as high as 16 ppb), in excess of the state limit of 10 ppb. Arsenic enters drinking water supplies from natural deposits in the earth or from agricultural and industrial practices, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And yet, a river of cleaner water from the Delta flows through the middle of town in the concrete confines of the California Aqueduct.

A warning that hangs at the Kettleman City Post Office sends a confusing message: “You don’t have to use an alternative (e.g., bottled water) supply,” the flyer reads. Yet an information sheet on arsenic from the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment suggests that long-term ingestion of arsenic at levels below the legal limit have been shown to increase risk of certain kinds of cancer.

Mares-Alatorre holds a manila folder. Inside is a flyer with images of five babies of Kettleman City parents who were born between 2008 and 2009. Each of the children show the distinct scars of cleft palates.

Residents of Kettleman City have contended with an array of pollution sources for decades, including pesticide drift, diesel emissions, and oil drilling wastes. One of the nation’s largest hazardous waste dumps, operated by Waste Management, a Houston-based company, is located here. Every year it accepts tens of thousands of tons of PCBs, asbestos, oil wastes and pesticides.

The city briefly entered the national spotlight in 2010, when the California Department of Public Health identified 11 Kettleman children born between 2007 and 2008 with chromosomal birth defects – including heart defects, cleft palate and club foot. In spite of the myriad of pollution sources, the state Department of Public Health could not identify a single cause for the spike in birth defects, citing the small population and multiple causes as confounding factors.

But the disfigured babies continue to symbolize the serious anxieties in this community of 1,500 – the vast majority of whom are farm workers living at or below the federal poverty line.

The health risks also animate Mares-Alatorre’s push for clean water. Right now a controversial proposal is in the works to fix the town’s water system. Waste Management has offered to pay off the water system’s $552,000 debt, which would allow the town to secure $8 million in state funding needed to install a plant to draw and treat drinking water from the California Aqueduct.

In exchange, Waste Management wants to expand its toxic waste landfill in town.

The proposal has fostered a lively conversation about risks and benefits. “Of course we want clean water to bathe our children in and to drink,” says Mares-Alatorre. “But at what price? Should we have to allow another major source of pollution into town in order to get it?”

On the opposite side of the valley from Kettleman City, dozens of small farm communities near Visalia also are dealing with contaminated groundwater – in these cases from years of over-application of fertilizers and pesticides. The problem is particularly acute in dozens of small, unincorporated towns – many of which are home to large populations of farmworkers and are served by rudimentary water systems.

The water systems tap into aquifers contaminated with nitrates, a constituent of of synthetic fertilizer and manure, and other agricultural contaminants. A 2012 report from the University of California at Davis found that 254,000 people in the Salinas Valley and Tulare Basin, two major agricultural regions, are at risk of nitrate contamination. Of the nitrates seeping into the Central Valley’s groundwater, a full 96 percent comes from the region’s croplands, the report found.

According to Peter Weyer, associate director of the University of Iowa’s Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination, nitrates are often seen as an indicator of “overall” water quality – and high levels can indicate the presence of other microbial or organic contaminants. “The problems can go way beyond nitrate in places where there is inadequate filtration,” Weyer says.

Nitrates are particularly serious problems for infants. At high enough concentrations they can cause methemoglobinemia, or “blue baby syndrome,” a condition in which an infant’s red blood cells are incapable of transporting oxygen. In adults, long-term exposure to nitrates can lead to the formation of carcinogenic compounds called nitrosamines, believed to contribute to elevate the likelihood of various forms of cancer.

So extensive and vast is the groundwater contamination that there is little hope for “cleaning” up the Central Valley’s aquifers, says Thomas Harter, an author of the UC Davis report. “There is nothing we can do that will solve this issue for them on the source side anytime soon. This is the water quality they will have for decades to come,” says Harter. “Even if we got rid of all the contamination sources tomorrow, it’s going to be decades before this mess is cleaned up. To think we’re going to remediate this problem away is the wrong path.”

One town, Seville, is located along the base of the Sierra foothills. There, local activist Becky Quintana has been pushing state and local officials to address the severe problems of the town’s water system, which is located beside a sprawling orange orchard.

From the pumps, a small array of coupled plastic pipes run through the middle of an irrigation ditch. This, Quintana says, is the town’s water main. When the ditch is full of irrigation water in summer, she says, the pipe is often submerged.

Irrigation water, unfiltered and loaded with dirt, debris and other contaminants can enter the water main through the rickety couplings. She says a neighbor once had a tadpole wriggle out of her kitchen tap. “We hear mixed messages,” says Quintana. “Sometimes the water district will tell us to boil the water, to get rid of the bacteria. But if you boil the water you concentrate the nitrates.” As a result, many people in these towns are spending upwards of $100 a month on bottled water – an expense most residents of these impoverished communities can ill-afford.

Though groundwater contamination has been a lingering political issue in California at least since the 1980s, the state has been slow to act. Quintana’s group, the Committee for a Better Seville, part of a larger coalition, la Asociación de Gente Unida por el Agua (the Association of People United for Water), have pressed state and local representatives for years to do something to reduce the threats.

Last year the community groups won passage of AB 685, the Human Right to Water Bill, an amendment to the state water code, which declares that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”

The ambitiously worded bill is modeled on a similar United Nations resolution passed in 2010, and adopted by 122 nations (the U.S. was one of 41 countries to abstain). But, just as with previous legislative and regulatory steps to reduce farm chemical contamination and make groundwater safe, when it comes to actual regulatory teeth to change the patterns of water consumption and engineering in the valley, AB 685 is of questionable practical effectiveness.

AB 685 does not force state agencies to ensure clean water, but to merely consider the water as a human right when “revising, adopting, or establishing policies, regulations, and grant criteria” that affect water used for domestic purposes.

A good illustration of the law’s weak regulatory potency is its applicability to the massive water-engineering project of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. Even if the project were to go forward as conceived, it seems there is little chance the project, designed specifically to ship cleaner water south, will ever reach the poor and clean water-deprived communities of the valley.

“AB 685 does not apply to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan,” wrote Nancy Vogel, of the Department of Water Resources. “BDCP is a habitat conservation plan under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and a natural community conservation plan under state law. [Therefore] there is no obligation created by AB 685 for the BDCP to solve problems outside its focus on species and habitat.”

Still, proponents such as Laurel Firestone, executive director of the Visalia-based Community Water Center, say the bill is a step toward addressing long-standing public health concerns. “AB 685 is very significant in creating a priority and focus at the state level. State agencies now have to consider drinking water more explicitly in their decision-making. That’s huge,” she says. “It’s made people look and see the disparities around drinking water across the state.”

In the meantime, state and federal agencies say they are committing financial resources and technical assistance to helping these communities address long-standing problems. According to the California Department of Public Health, efforts are ongoing in both Kettleman City and Seville, such as providing $50,000 to Kettleman residents from the state’s clean drinking water bond fund to purchase bottled water until a permanent solution is found. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it had awarded $174 million in funds to the state to “control water pollution and provide low-cost loans for both drinking water and wastewater infrastructure upgrades.”

John Borkovich, the manager of the state’s Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment program, says one possible solution is delivering safer water to communities by blending contaminated groundwater with cleaner water piped in from elsewhere. “There are some communities that have the means to blend with a cleaner water source and deliver water that does not exceed the maximum contamination levels,” says Borkovich. “But there are many other communities that can’t do this. So they either need help with a remediation system or to obtain another water source that is safe to drink.”

Just how long it will take to complete the large infrastructure projects required to bring clean water to isolated communities is unclear. Promises have been made and broken before, says Mares-Alatorre, and the poor people of the Central Valley have become accustomed to being at the back of the line when it comes to access to California’s increasingly scarce freshwater supplies. “People in Kettleman City assume that the state doesn’t care about them, that they’re on their own when it comes to water,” says Mares-Alatorre. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t keep fighting for what’s right.”

(09/15/2013) New research shows that a swath of San Joaquin Valley people living in rural poverty pay more than they can afford for their often-tainted tap water.

Two of every five households — nearly 4,000 customers — pay too much for tap water in a sampling of 51 small water systems across Fresno, Tulare and Kings counties, according to the study called “Assessing water affordability.”

And bills climb even higher for those who also buy bottled water to protect their families from the Valley’s underground water contamination.

“We confirmed what we had been hearing for a long time in communities,” said Carolina Balazs, a University of California at Davis researcher and consultant for the nonprofit Community Water Center in Visalia.

The Community Water Center, an advocacy group, joined California State University, Fresno and the nonprofit Pacific Institute in Oakland to produce the study, which was released last month. It included water systems in Sacramento.

The research is aimed at California legislators and other leaders faced with rebuilding crumbling water systems around the state. Future research will include a look at financially sustainable water systems in rural areas.

In the affordability study, the take-home message to the state: Craft new laws that help people cope with poverty, contamination and the added expense of bottled water.

“Legislators need to know there are many people who can’t afford an essential human need that most people take for granted,” said Maria Herrera, Community Water Center advocacy director.

Researchers found people are paying more than 2% of their household income for tap water in many places, such as in Allensworth in Tulare County, Armona in Kings County and Lanare in Fresno County.

The 2% threshold of affordability is set in a state law, Assembly Bill 2334, which passed last year. But researchers already see a problem with the state’s definition of affordability.

The threshold is applied to a median income for a water system, a common way to look at affordability. Half the ratepayers make more than the median, half make less. The approach allows poorer households to slip through the cracks, researchers said.

Even in water systems that meet the affordability threshold — including systems in Sacramento — thousands of poorer households pay more than 2% of their incomes for water.

The problem stood out in Fresno, Tulare and Kings counties. Based on the median income, nine of the 51 water systems surveyed in those counties did not meet the threshold. It’s 17% of the systems in the study, which means there is a significant problem.

But the numbers were much more daunting when researchers looked separately at households within the water systems, using U.S. Census data. Nearly 4,000 households paid too much for water — a whopping 40% of the people in the 51 systems.

“We’re going to miss a lot of people,” said Juliet Christian-Smith, a senior research associate with Pacific Institute.

Allensworth residents pay 3% of their income for tap water, the study showed. Add the cost of bottled water, and it climbs to 4.3%, more than twice the state affordability threshold.

Kayode Kadara, a retiree who lives in Allensworth, lives in a home with a reverse-osmosis filter to combat arsenic problems. The filter traps contaminants by forcing bad water through a membrane. At a price of $200 to $300, it was a peace-of-mind necessity for him.

But in the farmworker town of 500, reverse osmosis is beyond most folks.

“Paying for reverse-osmosis filters would be a hardship for people here,” Kadara said. “You have to understand that people don’t have enough income here.”

Researchers said state legislators must address that added cost for people who live in contaminated areas, such as the San Joaquin Valley.

The other part of the equation is the water systems themselves. They, too, face an uphill fight, said researcher Balazs.

In many places around the Valley, water pollution is likely to get worse because decades-old contaminants, called nitrates from farm fertilizers used in the past, are moving slowly into wells. Nitrates also come from septic tanks, sewage systems, dairy waste and rotting vegetation.

The cleanup costs probably will raise rates in places where people already can’t afford to pay water bills. In northern Tulare County, nitrate contamination appears in Yettem, Sultana, Monson, Seville, Orosi, East Orosi and Cutler.

Balazs said, “More and more water systems may find themselves in a difficult financial situation, torn between the need to upgrade or increase treatment to ensure safe drinking water while also keeping water bills low enough for customers to have access to affordable water.”